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trams and even over the dome of the casino, and the customers would give the little prodigy a round of applause and above all love him. I imagined that when, breathing hard but not too hard, I went back to my proud, avenged mother that the other customers would come and congratulate Maman on having produced such a superb acrobat, shake hands with her, and ask us to sit at their table. They would all smile at us and invite us to lunch at their homes the following Sunday. I got up and tried my flick of the heel, but the magic gift was withheld and I sat down again, gazing at Maman, to whom I could not give the fine present I had imagined.
    At nine in the evening my mother packed up and we went to wait for the tram by the public urinal, malodorously melancholic, while, dazed and half hypnotized, we watched happy, laughing, well-to-do revelers as they arrived by car to play roulette at the casino. My mother and I waited silently for the tram, humbly participating. To dispel the gloom of our joint solitude, my mother sought for something to say. “When we get home, I’ll cover your schoolbooks with pretty pink paper.” Without knowing why, I felt like crying and I squeezed my mother’s hand very hard. We led the grand life, as you can see, my mother and I. But we loved each other.

VII
     
    M AMAN of my childhood, with whom I felt snug and warm, her herb teas, gone forever. Gone forever her fragrant cupboard with its piles of verbena-scented linen trimmed with heartwarming lace which spelled home, her beautiful cherrywood cupboard, which I would open on Thursdays and which was my childish kingdom, a calm and wondrous valley dark and fruity scented with jam, as comforting as the shade under the drawing-room table, where I would imagine I was an Arab chief. Gone forever the bunch of keys which tinkled on her apron string and which were her badge of honor, her Order of Domestic Merit. Gone forever her trunk full of ancient silver trinkets with which I would play when I was convalescing. O furniture of my mother, gone forever! Maman, you who were alive and always gave me new heart, you who were a source of strength, you who had the knack of encouraging me blindly with absurd soothing words, Maman, from up there can you see your obedient little boy of ten?
    Suddenly I see her once more, all agog because the doctor has come to see her sick child. How excited she was by those visits of the doctor, a pompous, perfumed ass whom we admired passionately. Those paid visits brought the world to us, were a form of social life for my mother. A fine gentleman from outside would speak to that solitary creature, who suddenly became alive and gracious. And from the height of his eminence he would even drop political, nonmedical pronouncements, which rekindled the flame of my mother’s self-esteem, made of her an equal, and wiped out for a few minutes the leper spots of her isolation. No doubt she then remembered that her father had been a notable. I can still see her peasantlike respect for the doctor, a bombastic fool whom we thought the wonder of the world and whose every feature I worshipped, even the pockmark on his imposing proboscis. I can still see her fervent admiration as she watched him listen to my chest with his face reeking of eau de cologne, after she had handed him the brand-new towel to which he had a divine right. How scrupulously she observed the magic requirement of a towel for the examination. I can see her now, walking on tiptoe so as not to disturb him while, radiating genius, he took my pulse and, still exuding genius, consulted the fine watch on his hand. You thought it was grand, did you not, my poor Maman, for you were so unspoiled, so completely cut off from the joys of this world.
    I can see her now, hardly daring to breathe while the medical oaf pretentiously scribbled the prescription, which she saw as a talisman; I can see her making “shushing” gestures to prevent me from speaking while he was writing, to make